Hitler

did not respond to Hitler’s suggestion to look to the south, and to the spoils of the British Empire. He was more interested, he said, in matters of obvious European significance. He pressed Hitler on German interests in Finland, which he saw as contravening the 1939 Pact, and on the border guarantee given to Romania and the military mission sent there. Molotov asked how Germany would react were the Soviet Union to act in the same way towards Bulgaria. Hitler could only reply, unconvincingly, that he would have to consult Mussolini. Molotov indicated Soviet interest in Turkey, giving security in the Dardanelles and an outlet to the Aegean.
    Symbolizing the fiasco of the two-day negotiations, the closing banquet in the Soviet Embassy ended in disarray under the wail of air-raid sirens. In his private bunker, Ribbentrop – showing once more his unerring instinct for clumsiness – pulled a draft agreement from his pocket and made one last vain attempt to persuade Molotov to concur in a four-power division of a large proportion of the globe. Molotov coldly reasserted Soviet interest in the Balkans and the Baltic, not the Indian Ocean. The questions that interested the Soviet Union, went on Molotov, somewhat more expansively than during the actual negotiations, were not only Turkey and Bulgaria, and the fate of Romania and Hungary, but also Axis intentions in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Poland. The Soviet government also wanted to know about the German stanceon Swedish neutrality. Then there was the question of outlets to the Baltic. Later in the month, Molotov told the German Ambassador in Moscow, Graf von der Schulenburg, that Soviet terms for agreeing to a four-power pact included the withdrawal of German troops from Finland, recognition of Bulgaria as within the Russian sphere of influence, the granting of bases in Turkey, acceptance of Soviet expansion towards the Persian Gulf, and the cession by Japan of southern Sakhalin.
    Molotov listed these terms on 26 November. Hitler did not need to wait so long. He viewed the talks in Berlin, he had told his army adjutant Major Engel before Molotov came to the Reich capital, as a test of whether Germany and the Soviet Union would stand ‘back to back or breast to breast’. The results of the ‘test’ were now plain, in Hitler’s eyes. The two-day negotiations with Molotov had sufficed to show that irreconcilable territorial interests of Germany and the Soviet Union meant inevitable clashes in the near future. Hitler told Engel that he had in any case expected nothing from Molotov’s visit. ‘The talks had shown where the Russian plans were heading. M[olotov] had let the cat out of the bag. He (F[ührer]) was really relieved. It would not even remain a marriage of convenience. Letting the Russians into Europe meant the end of central Europe. The Balkans and Finland were also dangerous flanks.’
    Hitler’s conviction, hardening since the summer, was confirmed: the strike against the Soviet Union had to take place in 1941. Some time in the autumn, probably following Molotov’s visit, he sent his adjutants to search out a suitable location for field headquarters in the east. They recommended a spot in East Prussia, near Rastenburg, and he gave Todt orders to begin construction and have the headquarters completed by April. On 3 December he congratulated Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock on his sixtieth birthday and told him that the ‘Eastern Question is becoming acute’. He spoke of rumoured links between Russia and America, and Russia and England. To await developments was dangerous. But if the Russians were eliminated from the equation, British hopes of defeating Germany on the continent would vanish, and Japanese freedom from worries about a Soviet attack from the rear meant American intervention would be made more difficult.
    Two days later, on 5 December, he reviewed the objectives of the planned attack on the Soviet Union with Brauchitsch and Halder. Soviet ambitions in the Balkans, he declared, were a source of potentialproblems for the Axis. ‘The decision concerning hegemony in Europe will come in the battle against Russia,’ he added. ‘The Russian is inferior. The army lacks leadership.’ The German advantage in terms of leadership,
matériel
, and troops would be at its greatest in the spring. ‘When the Russian army is battered once,’ continued Hitler, in his crass underestimation of Soviet forces, ‘the final disaster is unavoidable.’ The aim of the